


Wolf Heart

by himitsutsubasa



Category: Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-16
Updated: 2014-07-16
Packaged: 2018-02-09 03:42:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1967631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/himitsutsubasa/pseuds/himitsutsubasa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daryl is a hunter first and foremost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wolf Heart

Sun filtered through the trees, green and gold after the leaves absorbed all the other colors. Birds twittered in the trees, peaceful for the first time in a hundred years, since the town miles away ceased to be a town and became a city. The brook tumbled, wave over wave, unaware of the change, save that the deer came by to drink a little more often and the squirrels had appeared in abundance. The squirrels chattered among themselves about the leaves that would not be blown away by the bag of winds or eaten by the monsters that rumbled in straight lines when winter came.

The hunter was no stranger to the sounds and feelings. He’d grown up surrounded by it all as a child when things got too hard at home and he’d learned to live off the land when he realized that the only food he’d get was what he found or shot dead.

He’d stopped pitying the small game he caught and thanked it for its nutrients instead.

As soon as he’d discovered the feel of tires on the road and the fact that there were no coppers in the area to arrest him for driving underage, he’d go to the library and learn all that he could about the plants and animals in the area. He figured if worse went to worse, he’d hide in the woods and be some sort of Daniel Boone or someone like that. When they read about Chris McCandless in English class, he’d felt a kindred spirit, not like the other kids who just wanted to get away from everyone. The hunter had felt a connection to the fella by living off the land.

And here he was; the most able person and the one true savior of the little band of ragamuffins.

A cop, his lady friend, her son by another cop, a lady with bruises, a man with a short temper, a little girl who looked so sad, a black man who hated Daryl’s brother, a lady who looked like she gave up, a young lady who took no shit, her sister who looked at the hunter like he might make a move of the younger one, an old man who looked at them both like a father, an Asian kid who looked like he belonged in the Indiana Jones movie with his hat and everything , a family he didn’t know well but fit the profile of all that was wrong in Texas according to Republicans, and his brother, the reddest Republican he’d ever known and that included his father.

He stepped forward, crossbow drawn and sighting through the grass. His clothes were green, though he knew that the animals were all color blind, to help him blend in. A layer of dirt was always helpful that way.

The deer didn’t even know he was coming. It was a pretty doe, not a recent mother or anything like that according to the way she smelled. He was only a few feet away and she still hadn’t seen him.

Daryl readied his finger on the trigger and waited.

She halted, aware that there was something nearby, but didn’t run. She looked around for a moment, and he clung closer to the bush, careful not to disturb anything. She went back to grazing and a bolt pierced her eye.

It ran right through one eye and out the other, destroying everything in between. He could hear the machine gun clatter and crack of her skull breaking and her brain splitting around the hard plastic as a hundred pounds of force propelled it forward and forward until it stopped. It was a quick death, clean and painless. She’d gone the best way she could with a hunter following her.

She swayed a moment, as if confused by the fact that she was no longer living. Then she dropped and he was there to catch her, rushing forward and embracing her. He lowered her to the ground with a quick twist, snapping her neck, just to be sure. It wasn’t cruelty, just insurance that her heart would stop beating and she’d rest in more peace than his human brethren.

He field dressed her there, scraping away everything that wasn’t of use to them and dropping it around the base of a tree. The rest he slung over his shoulder on a piece of plastic tarp he ripped off the camper a few days after he met Dale.

The long trek waited his feet and as he adjusted her weight, he felt the spell broken. He wasn’t a hunter, who knew too much, in the woods anymore; he was Daryl Dixon, redneck extraordinaire, coming home with a kill.

* * *

Glenn Rhee didn’t like the stereotypes of Asian folk at all. Daryl knew that and kept pressing it anyway, wanting to know what the boy would do when he pushed too far.

Daryl called him “Short Round” and “Chink” and all the other names he could think of just to push a little more, push a little harder. The kid just rolled his eyes and said something undeniably clever. Daryl loved it.

Little by little, he collected more and more about the kid, interested because for all his innocent face, the kid hid so much. Glenn was 22 and just finished with school when everything went bad. The kid was smart, the school kind of smart that Daryl had never had time for, but he called himself a pizza boy. He did some sort of thing with electricity if Daryl guessed right. He’d seen Glenn tinkering with a broken light once and saw it glittering away happily in Sophia’s hands the next day.

The kid wasn’t even Chinese. Korean, he said. Daryl had looked over the kid’s geography lesson one day, just to find the little country on the map. It was just above China and much smaller. Carl had caught him looking and just smiled, asking him if he could help them name all the countries in South America.

Daryl had helped, quietly and covertly. He tried not to understand the look in Amy’s eyes as she realized what he was doing. He didn’t want to incur the wrath of Andrea when she got back from where ever she was.

Glenn went on his little city raids and took people with him. Daryl tried to blame him for Merle’s loss, but the look on the kid’s face and the siren of the Ferrari told him all he wanted to know. He settled on blaming the walkers and the gods that had forsaken them all.

He went with them and tried to not take note of the way he wandered around Glenn, like the kid was the deer in the woods and he was still the hunter. He collected all the facts he could find about the kid. He stalked him, hunted him, and readied to sink his teeth into the soft flesh of that pale neck.

He restrained himself each time. Bite marks wouldn’t be taken lightly.

* * *

“Daryl, what are you doing?” Glenn, hat on and back pack in hand, watched him too. Daryl knew that, but he also knew that the kid didn’t watch him as often, or as closely.

“Walkin’, china man. You got a problem with that?” Daryl knew he sounded like he was growling; he didn’t care that the hunter under his skin showed a little more than usual.

Glenn rolled his eyes. It wasn’t just his eyes; it was the rest of him too. His brows moved and his shoulders rolled. His whole body seemed to give up the fight with a feeling of frustration and resignation.

“I thought we made some progress.” Glenn looked so tired, but a little amused, like he knew some deep secret.

Daryl wanted Merle back. Merle had never buckled under almond eyes. “Musta been a slip o’ the tongue, chink. Don’t start expecting nothing.”

“I won’t.” He breezed off and for a moment Daryl was stunned. When had the game changed? When had his prey started walking away like that?

When he no longer went for the kill.

Daryl kept skinning his squirrels. Fifteen of them, his hunter purred. They were going to be lucky that night, eat their fill. Still the dissatisfaction of a job incomplete burned like salt in a wound, bitter and caustic.

* * *

Glenn went back to usual after that, a little confused and wound up tight like a spring.

The kid was on some sort of drug, Adderall or something. That was what Daryl had thought when they first met. The truth was, the kid didn’t need drugs to focus or think. He wasn’t the kind of kid who got caught up in Merle’s business of buying ADHD medications off people who had good decent health care and reselling them to sleep deprived university students. The kid just thought a mile a minute and kept on thinking that fast all while doing whatever it was he was doing, even driving. The kid was a demon driver.

The kid didn’t get that of course. He’d jump to conclusions and say things that took a little explaining. He’d act like it was all just a simple problem and trying to tell him otherwise was like slamming into a brick wall over and over again.

Or, no, it was more like asking Glenn to explain was asking the kid to slam into the brick wall. To him, it just made sense, like the red of the bricks and the cracks in the cement.

And Daryl followed that. He stalked it and just barely restrained himself from going in for the kill. The kid was getting more and more delectable each day and Daryl felt the thrumming in his bones that told him to pin the kid down and remind him who the alpha was. To remind the kid that he was the provider.

But, he logically, he never forgot that Glenn was the same. If Daryl’s hunter made him an animal in a man’s body, then the hunter in Glenn was what made the kid inherently human. The kid was a human alpha, worrying, planning, providing, and guarding. Daryl respected that, but damn him if he didn’t want to show the kid exactly where everything stood.

Instead, he pressed on and made sure that Glenn knew that they were the alphas under the unspoken democratic leadership of Rick. He wanted the kid to fight back, to assert so he could assert. But the kid had something so human in mind, to work together. They would be the alphas together. Daryl was struck by how innately kind that was and wondered if maybe the kid knew more about being an alpha than he did.

* * *

Glenn didn’t notice the way Daryl stalked him. He didn’t notice the almost silent steps in the house and the on the road. He didn’t notice the muffled growls and the pointed glares. He went on, blissfully ignorant prey under the watch of a guarding beast.

The others, though, they noticed. Well, Jim had been the first, had always been the first, but he was dead now and dead men, even those who returned, didn’t speak. Andrea, when Amy was gone, and Rick when Shane went a crazy as cocoa puffs, they knew. Andrea said nothing, just held Glenn a little closer to her side when they went out together or sat down to eat. Rick would try to talk to him, muttering things about properly courting someone and Daryl just refused to listen to that.

Oddly enough, Glenn was the most forthcoming with good speech and attention.

“Can you teach me how to do that?”

Daryl looked up, a little irritated by the fact the pup had come up and talked to him. “Do what now?”

“Stalk. You know? Prey?”

Daryl barely restrained his laughter, letting it bubble over the edges. “You? Kid, you make as much noise as a small herd of cattle.” The kid flushed at that, red in his cheeks with a fade that made it look like it was sprayed on his skin. Then the kid pulled down the hat and set his jaw.

“It was just one time…” Daryl put his crossbow down and looked up.

“I could’ve heard that car in Milwaukee.”

Glenn flushed a little darker, if that was possible with the way the red touched his skin. “That was Rick’s idea.”

Daryl watched him for a moment, watched the color diffuse and bleed; it was absolutely gorgeous.

“Fine. Kid, you stick close and quiet.” He took a step, soft and silent, toe first and heel last, feeling the earth underneath his hiking boots, pressing before he stepped. Glenn followed.

“Feel that?”

“There’s a rock under my foot.”

“Yeah, work your way around it.”

A soft rustle of leaves as Glenn brushed them aside to find ground, the snap of a twig in the distance and the laughter of children. The sound of birds, large birds. Daryl felt the hunter tugging at him, pulling him into a faster walk, silent, deadly.

Glenn followed.

Daryl pulled out his crossbow and readied it, sliding a bolt in.

“Now, stay still.” He found the pigeons in a tree, a whole flock of them, looking a little skinny and haggard. Chances were, in the past life, they were city birds, plump of the excess of fast food and waste of the masses. Though they had lost weight, they were still good. Somehow they had survived in the wilderness this long and they would survive much longer, or at least until winter came.

He wasn’t quite sure which to shoot; they all looked the same size. A proper shot would scatter them, so he only had one chance. Glenn waved at him from the other side of the thicket and Daryl quickly worked his way over.

With a smile on his face, Glenn pointed to one bird. It was large and plump, a delicious looking fowl.

Daryl realigned himself and noticed that there was a bird next to it. So many in the tree, that they were pressed near side to side. It was a risk, no one knew if the walkers watched the sky for movements, like humans did, or if there were others in the area. It wasn’t that big a tree and the forest top was uneven. He figured that the birds would fly off to another thicket without anyone being the wiser.

Daryl lined up the shot and fired.

The bold went through and the hunter crowed in delight. The rest of the flock was suitably startled, taking to the air and flying away. The two, impaled on the same arrow, fell to the ground and into Glenn’s waiting arms. A quick twist told Daryl that the kid had learned something about bringing home kills.

The kid marveled at the birds in his hands, both and turned to Daryl. “That was awesome.”

Daryl felt some heat in his cheeks. Infatuation, obsession, fixation. He was too old for all that.

“Thank you.”

* * *

Eventually, unsure of how far the smaller group had traveled and whether or not they should keep going, they found a community. It was small, almost completely composed of minorities, in the rocky mountains of California. Somehow, they’d worked their way north and then down the Sierras in time for harvest. The central valley, agricultural wonder that it was, gave a bountiful harvest.

They spent their days working for their food, taking turns on watch duty, learning to gather and process the food from the braceros and coast folk. There was another Asian group, just three people of different ethnicities, but one was Korean and that was enough.

Daryl wasn’t quite sure what to make of Glenn speaking rapidly in another language, sometimes looking a little sheepish as the older man said something. The man would always laugh before showing Glenn how to work the wine press and feed the machine.

Daryl, though a hunter by trade, found himself with the sheep and cattle, looking more like a cowboy each day. Jose, the other ranch hand, showed him how to shear sheep and clean the wool. Then, Maggie and the girls would start spinning and weaving on machines they’d gotten a few months ago from an Amish community, which had appeared totally unaffected by the new life.

“It’s strange.” A girl, Daryl didn’t remember her name, only that she was actually Chinese and made really good food, said.

“What’s strange?” He lifted the box of preserves she was making.

She waved the spoon at him. “We developed over a hundred-fifty years of technology to get away from this kind of frontier lifestyle and here we are back again. It just feels like nature is telling us to confront foolish arrogance or face decimation. Though, I guess the prediction was true.”

“What prediction?”

She smiled. “The ones who will survive the apocalypse are doctors, rednecks, and those they are willing to protect.”

Daryl stared for a moment. “What did you do before all this?”

She shrugged. “Doctor. Eight years of school and two hundred thousand dollars of debt, only to get a call to not come into work because the world is ending”

He didn’t know what to say to that.

* * *

Daryl stared at the ceiling. It was a light blue, almost like the horizon in the evening. Under his head, he had a pillow and mattress and over his body, he had a blanket. He had a full stomach, filled with roasted sheep, grilled vegetables, and fluffy bread. He never thought that he would miss bread as much as he did. It was a good life, a really good life.

“Those they are willing to protect.”

He heard the soft snuffling noises of someone waking up from next to him. Glenn roused and looked over the edge of his pile of blankets.

“Who?”

“Nothing.”

“It’s,” Glenn looked at the little wind-up clock they had in their storage/bed room, “three a.m.?”

Daryl stayed silent and Glenn rolled onto his side with a groan. “Why are you talking to yourself at three a.m.?”

Daryl turned and found almond eyes staring at him, dark in the night, almost obscured by hair that was growing a little too long to stay out of the way. Glenn blinked sleepily, looking soft and bitable and nothing like the alpha he was.

“Just something that Chinese girl said.”

“Funny how now I know you’re talking about Marie. What did she say?”

“Do you really want to talk at three a.m.?” he asked, mimicking Glenn’s tone. The kid snorted.

“I can’t go back to sleep now, can I?”

No, you can’t. You never could. You curled up near me whenever it was my watch because you weren’t willing to close your eyes and whenever we travelled by night, you always asked to take the bike because you couldn’t stand the idea of falling asleep.

Daryl didn’t say any of it out loud.

“She said that those who would survive the apocalypse were ‘Doctors, rednecks, and those they were willing to protect.’”

“What about the Amish?”

“A kind of redneck, I reckon.”

“She’s right. We wouldn’t be here without you.”

“She’s wrong.” Daryl let his mouth run, because it was late and very likely, he would have to leave in the morning. He couldn’t handle the domesticity.

“Why?” Glenn crawled closer and then rested on his stomach with his arms tucked under his head. Daryl watched the kid stare at him, like he was the only person in the world. At three a.m., they were probably the only two awake in the house, their little world.

“Because you would have survived and you’re what? An engineer or something like that?”

“I would have died, if I hadn’t...”

“Trust me, kid. You would have lived.”

“… met you.” Glenn rolled on his side, facing Daryl. “There are more things than walkers that would kill a man.”

Daryl stared at him before growling, “No chick flick moments.”

He wasn’t quite sure what made Glenn laugh, but the kid did. “I wouldn’t dream of it, Dean.”

They talked on a little longer, until Daryl felt sleep tug at his eyelids and the clock read four a.m.. Heat pressed into his side and breathed into his skin. Everything was smooth and languid, like a warm bath or a summer rain. Daryl yawned.

“You can have nice things, you know,” Glenn yawned in return; his eyes were still sharp and smiling.

“Whaddyamean?”

“You, Daryl Dixon, are allowed to have nice things.” Daryl inhaled the soft, sweet scent of roasted chestnuts and cinnamon. “You don’t have to worry about them breaking or not wanting you back.”

“I hope you really mean that.” Daryl curled around the body that rested next to him, nosing until he found a heartbeat pulsing under the skin. His prey, his alpha, his mate, his friend.

Glenn breathed, “I do.”

Daryl nipped at the junction between Glenn’s neck and shoulder. Arms wrapped around his neck in a choking embrace as Glenn bared his neck for more bites and kisses.

Daryl breathed deeply.

**Author's Note:**

> I played with the idea that he was a little more animal than he realized, though not an actual animal.
> 
>  
> 
> Also, I head canon that Glenn is an octopus so…
> 
> “Mrmmppphhh, Daryl….”
> 
> “Stop moving trying to suffocate me. I ain’t going nowhere.”


End file.
